Reading Response # 6 Stephen Dunn

One of the first “hot spots” from Stephen Dunn was the idea of revisiting your poems after a long time. I believe this a great exercise to explore how much as a writer has evolved ever since that poem. The idea that we would be the same person after years of writing a poem seems far fetch. Even if we haven’t changed as person is like Stephen Dunn said “even if you remained the same, the world around you hasn’t…”.Even if you still feel like you’re the same person that wrote that poem, your environment has change. You have to be able to reflect on the changes in your environment and decided if your poem is really delivering the right message on this different environment. Another thing that I found extremely fascinating was the idea of “Trusting the tale, not the teller”. Dunn talked about how a poem can seem to be reflecting life when in reality everything can be fictitious. I like the way he phrase it “With luck, it’ll live as the poem’s good companion, casting some light and maybe a few shadows”. The truth can serve as tool to help the reader think what might be a reality and what might make believe. It is up to the reader to make the guess but is up to the author to guide the reader in the right direction of the poem.

One of my question towards Dunn would be “When do you know that you have found what you want to say in a poem?” He talked about after a few stanzas he decided to change the personality of the angel. After that he wanted the angel to find some support or help from the angel community. Finally, he wanted the angel to heal and to go back to his old ways. But he also talked about how he thought of making the angle take a new step in life or a new attitude.  When do you know what you want to say? And How do you know you’re a saying enough?

I really like and agree with his method of writing. I was a bit skeptical at the beginning but after reading about his process I was really impressed. I always have been a person that likes to know what he’s going to say before writing it. This idea of writing a few stanzas and then really think about what you can do with your poem really hasn’t been my method of writing. I like it and I agree with his technique because it lets you explore different ideas and places where you want to take the poems. In his case he could have let the angel give up on humanity or he could have realized that there a darker side of life. There were a lot of choices that Dunn could have played with on the poem. I think that was one of the main things I got from this reading. Just because you have an idea of what you want to write doesn’t mean that’s the only option.